The simple part first: the massive, monumental beast of a comic book movie released under the gravely ponderous title Zack Snyder’s Justice League is better in basically every single way that can be quantified than just plain Justice League from 2017, which is both fundamentally the same thing and so wildly, indescribably different that it […]
Just rolling around a phrase like “Paul W.S. Anderson’s best movie” feels a little bit idiotic. Being “good” isn’t part of the point; being an enormous, ludicrous spectacle of the most unapologetically gaudy nonsense that a middle-aged video game nerd thinks is “cool” is the point. And this is why the most important Anderson text […]
The film that has been released in the United States and the United Kingdom as [The] Iron Mask, with the article disappearing if you (like me) are west of the Atlantic – that banal little title covering up a truly dumbfounding number of AKAs in at least English and Russian including Viy 2, Journey to […]
Not everyone will agree with me, I know, but to my mind, 2017’s Wonder Woman sets up a pretty high bar to clear, as one of the few superhero movies of the 2010s to successfully thread the needle between “superhero comics are modern mythology, with all the gravity that entails” and “popcorn movies need to […]
The for Gerard Butler vehicles is about as low as low gets, so if I first say that Greenland is, like, obviously the best Gerard Butler movie I’ve ever seen, I have given you very little information. It could still be a bad movie, and indeed, if we were to talk strictly in terms of […]
So help me, I really do feel sorry for The New Mutants and the poor saps who made it. If all had gone according to plan, it would have slunk into theaters in April 2018, gotten bored reviews comparing it unfavorably to Logan as an example of trying to do a different genre than action-thriller […]
Any serious bad movie watcher knows that the films that are very famous for being bad generally aren’t really the worst of the worst. Like, Plan 9 from Outer Space? Helpless and very stupid, but it’s got its charms – it’s not even the worst Ed Wood movie. The subjects of Mystery Science Theater 3000? […]
It’s easy – very, very easy, I’d say – to look at the current state of comic book movies and feel nothing but cold dislike for the machine-pressed non-art that the genre has largely turned into, as we enter the third decade of the post-X-Men superhero boom. But, while I have no desire to apologise […]
The most interesting thing about 6 Underground The only thing that is interesting about 6 Underground whatsoever is how it was financed and distributed. The 14th film directed by Michael Bay comes after a bizarre dozen years in his career, during which time he focused on only two kinds of production: five Transformers pictures, each […]
A quarter of a century has passed since commercial & music video director Michael Bay made his first feature, and rapper and sitcom actor Will “The Fresh Prince” Smith made his big push into movie stardom, with 1995’s Bad Boys, a big, bombastic action-comedy extravaganza that is, by Bay standards, unusually tidy and legible. Those […]
You’ve got to hand it to the Walt Disney Company: in only four years and two days, they managed to completely slaughter the golden goose of Star Wars. Like, the strongest brand name in the history of popcorn cinema. That Star Wars. I say this on the occasion of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, […]
If the whole point of a movie is that it follows the narrative logic of a video game, I wonder: does that mean that giving that film a “the same thing only with a few purely cosmetic tweaks” type of sequel actually counts as a strength? This question arrives on the back of Jumanji: The […]
